Network Manager sending regular unencrypted requests?

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Hi all, I just installed Portmaster recently and was monitoring my network traffic.

Noticed that NetworkManager from /usr/sbin/NetworkManager makes regular unencrypted requests to fedoraproject.org

Assuming that NetworkManager is https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tools/NetworkManager. It does not appear to do any critical functions. I’m on a desktop with a stable connection, so “automatic network detection and configuration” are not needed. Also poked around to see if I could configure it but had no success.

  1. How can I configure NetworkManager? I do not need it polling an external server this regularly, in fact I’m considering disabling it. For now I’ve blocked its traffic to see if anything critical breaks.
    I only managed to find this: Tools/NetworkManager/CLI - Fedora Project Wiki, but it was not what I need.
  2. If NetworkManager does perform a critical function, can I at least encrypt its traffic?

I’m still new to Fedora and Linux in general, especially on something as technical as this, so any guidance is appreciated, thank you!

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Here’s the relevant documentation and the default configuration:

You can disable it by removing the respective package or by modifying the configuration:

sudo tee /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/00-connectivity.conf << EOF > /dev/null      
[connectivity]
enabled=false
EOF
sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager.service

Yes, but then you will see the following message in the log:

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Wow thank you for the quick and detailed reply!
Especially for linking to the docs and other sources, made it much easier to understand what the CLI command was supposed to do. Managed to reconfigure NetworkManager, and verified that the network requests have stopped.

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